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J-school failure: Just 26 percent of new reporters have skills to do the job

A journalism degree can cost nearly $100,000 for graduate students, but for many it's a waste of money because they are leaving school without the skills needed in the new age of digital reporting and publishing, according to a sweeping new survey of the industry.

The highly-regarded Poynter Institute, an international strategy center and leader in journalism education, found in their 2013 “Future of Journalism” study that only one quarter of journalism school students showed up on the job ready for work.

Asked to judge “the last person their organization hired,” just 26 percent of media professionals said “the person had ‘most’ or ‘all’ of the skills necessary to be successful.”

That poor assessment of journalism students by newsroom executives spread to their indictment of what kids are being taught today and also revealed a massive divide between industry officials and those in the education field who think they are doing a great job.

COnsidering the length of the pipeline, I don't think you can blame this on Obama. You might be able to blame Obama on this.

The good news is that it sounds like Poynter has been listening and hopefully the people who write paychecks will listen as well. The barrage of complaints I read in the comments of newspapers aren't that the reporters aren't being objective (which would be a valid complaint on its own) , it's that the articles are poorly written and difficult to read due to spelling errors, grammatical errors, sentence and paragraph construction. The kids that public and private schools refused to demand good writing and language skills from, claiming that such militarization of expression would kill creativity, are now in their thirties and some of them not only don't know that they speak and write poorly, they are hostile to correction.

Actually I don't see that a journalism degree is a particularly necessary prerequisite to be a journalist, or work in the trade, in any way. It's like saying that one can't be a qualified fiction writer without a graduate degree in creative writing, or also like that transparently-fallacious little trick the 'accredited' degreed historians use of dismissing any first- or second-person account that disagrees with their own pet rock conceptions as "Merely anecdotal" or "Apocryphal" until the same thing (Now even once-more removed from the event) appears in a footnote by one of their own cognoscenti who outranks the skeptic.

COnsidering the length of the pipeline, I don't think you can blame this on Obama. You might be able to blame Obama on this.

The good news is that it sounds like Poynter has been listening and hopefully the people who write paychecks will listen as well. The barrage of complaints I read in the comments of newspapers aren't that the reporters aren't being objective (which would be a valid complaint on its own) , it's that the articles are poorly written and difficult to read due to spelling errors, grammatical errors, sentence and paragraph construction. The kids that public and private schools refused to demand good writing and language skills from, claiming that such militarization of expression would kill creativity, are now in their thirties and some of them not only don't know that they speak and write poorly, they are hostile to correction.

They won't listen. Not as long as the hard left is in the position of teaching these new J School stenographers. We have too many journalists trying to be the next Woodward and Bernstein instead of the next Ernie Pyle. They put themselves...instead of us in the middle of the story.

I'm even seeing this lunatic bias and willingness to believe what they are told instead of drawing conclusions based in fact from actual research...coming from the J School I graduated from.

Actually I don't see that a journalism degree is a particularly necessary prerequisite to be a journalist, or work in the trade, in any way. It's like saying that one can't be a qualified fiction writer without a graduate degree in creative writing, or also like that transparently-fallacious little trick the 'accredited' degreed historians use of dismissing any first- or second-person account that disagrees with their own pet rock conceptions as "Merely anecdotal" or "Apocryphal" until the same thing (Now even once-more removed from the event) appears in a footnote by one of their own cognoscenti who outranks the skeptic.

I understand why they do that, in the belief that the university polices through reputation, but I find it no less irritating than some jackass on the internet whose response is "link or it didn't happen".

This is a microcosm of higher education as a whole. Several years ago, I had to assist a captain whose debts had jeopardized her security clearance in writing a rebuttal to the board. Her first draft was an incomprehensible mess, and I ended up having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. This was a commissioned officer who was barely literate, despite a bachelor's degree, who had made it through k-12 and college and the MIOBC without being able to write a coherent sentence. Since then, I've come across a number of college graduates whose basic skills were astonishing poor. We don't educate anymore.

This is a microcosm of higher education as a whole. Several years ago, I had to assist a captain whose debts had jeopardized her security clearance in writing a rebuttal to the board. Her first draft was an incomprehensible mess, and I ended up having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. This was a commissioned officer who was barely literate, despite a bachelor's degree, who had made it through k-12 and college and the MIOBC without being able to write a coherent sentence. Since then, I've come across a number of college graduates whose basic skills were astonishing poor. We don't educate anymore.

Sic hacer pace, para bellum.
Sent from my android.

Our local newscasters drive me nuts. Despite my emails to them, they insist on beginning a sentence with "Meantime ..." They also pronounce the "t" in often, and "enunciate" to the point of improper pronunciation words like "did-dint" , "Stew- dint", and "import-tint" .

This is a microcosm of higher education as a whole. Several years ago, I had to assist a captain whose debts had jeopardized her security clearance in writing a rebuttal to the board. Her first draft was an incomprehensible mess, and I ended up having to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. This was a commissioned officer who was barely literate, despite a bachelor's degree, who had made it through k-12 and college and the MIOBC without being able to write a coherent sentence. Since then, I've come across a number of college graduates whose basic skills were astonishing poor. We don't educate anymore.

Sic hacer pace, para bellum.
Sent from my android.

When I was on the board in our HOA, a fellow board member wrote for our little newsletter. She is a teacher in the public school system here with a master's degree. Her language skills were so lacking that another woman and I had to do a total rewrite. She had no clue about paragraphs, sentences, spelling, punctuation, or basic use of the English language. She is a very kind and good hearted person, but we dreaded the monthly rewrites. No wonder Florida schools rank fairly low.

‎" To the world you are just one more person, but to a rescued pet, you are the world.""A Nation of Sheep Breeds a Government of Wolves!"

Crocodiles are easy. They try to kill & eat you. People are harder. Sometimes they pretend to be your friend first.” Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter